Stefan Ried's Blog

Informatica is one of the traditional leaders when it comes to data quality and data integration. More than 4,000 customers trust Informatica's software products globally and drive more than half a billion dollars in revenue. Informatica solves many of the traditional data integration challenges, for example, between custom developed apps and packaged ERP solutions. As a result, IT operations professionals and enterprise architects are well aware of Informatica’s solutions. However, what has gone under the radar so far is Informatica's cloud computing approach. For about two years now, Informatica has provided www.informaticacloud.com, a cloud-based integration offering, for customers. Informatica recently announced a new version of this service, and Forrester had the chance to talk to the vendor prior to the launch. The new solution offers an improved service for data quality, B2B data transformations, and a number of continuous improvements. But what really caught my attention is Informatica's well-kept secret of a sophisticated agent technology.

Back-office managers and European customers have ignored the message — until now

Every week the platform as a service (PaaS) market has something exciting happening. After VMware recently announced a partnership with salesforce.com to jointly develop vmforce, the virtualization expert today managed to be part of Google’s latest announcement of Google’s App Engine for Business. This is specifically important for ISVs.

Still, one of the biggest strategic concerns that ISVs have in moving their applications into the cloud is the long term safety of an investment into a single technology stack or hosted PaaS offering. Led by IBM and other major vendors (except Google) the open cloud manifesto was launched last year along with other standard efforts to make the cloud more interoperable and portable. Actually, many cloud offerings even mean a double lock-in for ISVs – into the specific new technology stack and in many cases into the single hosting service of the PaaS vendor. The history of Java and web services teaches us that the path through standard bodies can be a solid basis to avoid these vendor lock-in situations. However, the tech industry has also learned, mainly from Microsoft, that the establishment of de-facto standards, evolved out of originally proprietary approaches, can in some cases be a faster path to market share.

SAP’s customers and the analyst community have been speculating about the possibility of SAP acquiring a middleware company for a while. After it had missed out on acquiring one of the heavyweights like BEA and hesitated over TIBCO and Progress Software, SAP and Sybase agreed yesterday on the $5.8 billion transaction.

Sybase used to be a database, but its database’s visibility in the market decreased so dramatically that, in a recent Forrester survey, it wasn’t considered to be a primary database choice by any application domain. A good share of the 4% of open source databases used in the ERP space are actually SAP’s open source MaxDB (based on SOFTWARE AG’s original ADABAS D), which is a default for SAP systems if a customer doesn’t provide a third-party database like Oracle or DB2. SAP is unlikely to replace this default database with Sybase. This would be an even less important database than MaxDB, which integrates well with NetWeaver. But different analysts have different opinion and you might like to look for Boris Evelson's take on the impact of Sybase's database. If SAP runs a careful post-merger process, it will recognize Sybase’s database knowledge and employ all the engineers who have already developed in-memory database capabilities to bring Hasso’s idea from the Palo Alto “garage” to full product availability. While SAP has deployed in-memory capabilities in its analytics technology stack, the in-memory capabilities for transactions are still in the lab.

VMware And salesforce.com Join Forces To Push PaaS To Mainstream Adoption With vmforce

salesforce.com and VMware announced today the development of a joint product and service offering named vmforce. Forrester had a chance to talk to executives at both companies prior to the announcement, and I am quite impressed by the bold move of the two players. Most developers in corporate environments and ISVs perceive the two stacks as two totally different alternatives when selecting a software platform. While the VMware stack, with its Tomcat-based Spring framework, reached mainstream popularity among Java developers with its more lightweight standard Java approach, salesforce.com’s Force.com stack was mostly attractive to developers who liked to extend CRM packaged apps with individual business logic or to ISVs that created new applications from scratch. In some cases, the Java standard and the more proprietary APEX language at Force.com even appeared as competitive options.

Tuxedo is Oracle’s application environment for the non-Java languages. Like most “legacy” transaction servers, Tuxedo provides major large enterprise functionality to the programming languages prior to Java. Tuxedo had focused on C/C++ and COBOL until now. Among a couple of innovations, the most exciting news in the just-announced Oracle Tuxedo 11g release is the support for Ruby and Python. This pushes these newer languages immediately up the enterprise performance and reliability scale, making them comparable to COBOL, ABAP, and NATURAL.

The huge challenge for Oracle after this move will be to get access to the Ruby and Python developer communities. Most of them are looking more at open source runtime environments than at heavyweight enterprise transaction environments. However, this latest move by Oracle may resonate with these young open source natives, who’ve gone from university to their first job at banks, insurance companies, and other traditional mainframe shops. Ruby and Python on Tuxedo could be appropriate choices for those developers who want to move stuff off a mainframe but don’t want to get into COBOL on the new platform again.

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Hi, I'd like to share part two of a recent discussion that I had with Martin Schindler, Editor of Silicon.de. See part one here in case you missed it.

Martin Schindler: You indicated earlier that interest in third-party maintenance has increased since SAP wanted to make its Enterprise Support basically mandatory. Is this just excitement or real demand?

Stefan Ried: Yes, interest has increased. We're also seeing that from the vendor side. In addition to Rimini Street, which already offers maintenance for SAP systems, there is also Aptech, netCustomer, the Spinnaker Management Group, and Versytec, which are today limited to PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel. The vendor space has developed further, and the list of SAP-supporting vendors will soon become longer. Finally, it makes sense to ask the larger systems integrators, such as Wipro, Tata Consultancy Services, IBM Global Services, and Siemens (SIS), which are also the largest SAP integrators, to quote for offering SAP third-party maintenance.

Martin Schindler: This is interesting. We've read little about such offers.

Stefan Ried: These integrators naturally don't make a lot of noise about these things, as they also have a partner relationship with SAP, of course. At the end of the day, the demand will be balanced with the supply — and if more customers request SAP maintenance from their systems integrator, they will start to offer it.

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I'd like to share a recent discussion that I had with Martin Schindler, Editor of Silicon.de

Martin Schindler: There are experts who talk of a non-existing market when it comes to SAP third party maintenance. Is that correct?

Stefan Ried: You could have the impression, especially for Germany, because companies remain very close to SAP and many have decided for a Single-Vendor-Strategy. But in other countries it is much less the case. However the price politics of SAP in the last year and now the slow innovation speed has raised the discussion of alternative maintenance model again.

Martin Schindler: Are there German users with real interest in obtaining maintenance for their SAP system through another company?

Stefan Ried: Yes, there is definitely interest.

We regularly make, and particularly in the last year, sample calculations for users (as well as for system integrators) if it is worth going for third-party maintenance. It depends on various factors, whether it is worth it.

Martin Schindler: What do these factors look like?

Stefan Ried: Companies must check, for example, how much "know-how" exists in-house. Third-party maintenance can work very well, if not everything from SAP-Maintenance is needed. This is for example the case, when parts of the SAP-System are regarded as frozen, small legal changes follow, or to repair a bug. With this technical problems, compatibility with operating system patches, performance problems within an established system can be addressed and the system can operate securely with very little change. So, third-party maintenance vendors can, especially for older SAP systems, work very well.

Oracle is about to launch its Cloud Computing strategy with a worldwide roadshow. What does this mean for Oracle customers and partners?

First of all, Oracle remains a technology platform provider and will not jump into the hosting business themselves for PaaS. Only for the space of hosted applications, will they remain in the OnDemand hosting business. Let’s have a look at the SaaS and PaaS segments separately:

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Cloud computing challenges the CIO legally as well as technically!

Cloud computing is the availability of standard IT resources over the internet in a pay-per use model. Initially this is an attractive proposition. However there are many challenges which CIOs will face when running firm critical applications and data over the internet. The most successful CIOs have built an IT governance strategy to avoid the uncontrolled variety of technologies, meta data and business process evolution in their IT landscape. A good governance strategy ultimately makes the implementation of legal compliance requirements from Basel II or SOX much easier. Without searching first for critical data, an orderly approach is much simpler and the CIO won’t be the only one sleeping better.

So long as everything is in your own company or at local infrastructure, IT governance and compliance should be governed centrally from the CIO office. But what happens when a firm’s cloud computing is effectively deployed? This technology paradigm has its largest cost savings when applications and business processes have extremely high and uneven resource requirements. In most cases these are automatically firm critical applications and confidential data. The responsibility of a CIO then moves from pursuing operational excellence in the datacenter, to the greater responsibility of developing and managing intelligent sourcing concepts in the cloud and bringing its consequences under control. The large cloud computing vendors are nearly without exception international firms and a core basis for their cost-effective deployment lies in their global sourcing strategies. IT governance and legal compliance must also be developed to cloud governance and global provider governance.